I didn’t expect it to go this way.

Why?

Why?!

Why did it come to this?!

My arm was bleeding and barely attached to my broken shoulder. My legs wouldn’t follow my orders no matter how much I screamed at them to move. I couldn’t even feel them anymore. The distinct smell of blood was heavy; my friends’ bodies were strewn across the forest floor, barely any light peeking through the tree leaves to illuminate their remains.

The six of us were in a crescent shape around the thing that was in front of us, me and one other who I couldn’t even identify from the mix of gloom and how mutilated they were. We all had supernatural abilities, and yet we were all dying here. I suppose, in a twisted twist of fate, “we” did not include me. A petal was soulbound to me, but I couldn’t draw on its power; that is, if it even had any. We had already tested the full extent of our petals’ abilities after we all got them, and mine was certainly not enhanced luck or anything of the sort. I had guessed enough coin flips wrong to know that much. The fact that I couldn’t draw on its power suggested it was a passive ability, yet with months of testing, we still didn’t know what my petal did. Mine was a black rose petal of all things, if it wasn’t misfortunate enough!

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Through my one working eye, I saw the monster in front of me, its distance from me inscrutable. It was the size of a small house, living, serrated blades moving and squirming within and around its form like a tongue. Five serrated hammers made of what could only be described as the bottom of a dog’s foot were the limbs it stood on, cracking open and revealing red flesh with a squelching noise every time they slammed down on a surface harder than themselves. The blade-tongue-monster-thing continued its way forward to me, only being able to track me by scent or heat signature, I gathered from its lack of sensory body parts. People could sometimes “taste” the air, and that was the only reason I didn’t rule out scent as a possibility. I mean, the thing moved like a tongue after all.

But none of that mattered right now. I still had the drive to live, but I was in so much pain that my mind started romanticizing the idea of being put out of my misery. I watched helplessly as the razor tongue’s hammer limb closest to me was raised up and swung back. My final thought as I saw the broken limb fly at me, more like a flail than like a mace, was:

Now would be a really good time to suddenly find out what my petal did.